Hey creators – I’d love to learn more about how members of this community are offering live streaming as a reward today!
Has anyone tried livestreaming as a reward for patrons? What’s it like?
What tools and services do you use?
Anything super awesome or super painful about those tools or the process in general?
How do you make the livestream private to patrons? Does it matter that it’s private to patrons?
Recommendations, rants and raves welcome!
Hello, I have no feedback on this other than I’m also interested in @ replies to this post! About to update my Patreon page for the first time in years and I’m looking to add a live stream reward… wondering how to go about it and what has been working well for others.
I use webinar software called WebinarJam and send the sign on links according to contribution level. After the stream is done, you do have to go into your YouTube software and change the recording to private or delete it if you don’t want people to see your replay.
Wish I had more to contribute here but I have never streamed! 
But what I’ve seen others use are probably mostly Twitch (Creative) which is pretty great, Periscope, Youtube streaming seems to be a thing and also this thing: www.join.me
I know lots of people stream so hope some more of them chime in here 
I do monthly YouTube live events with what I’ve been up to and Q&A - unlisted, I post the link to my Patreon activity feed, limited to the corresponding pledge level.
What is tricky is that such unlisted YouTube events don’t generate a notification on YouTube (“Gina is now live!”) and hence my Patrons keep missing my broadcasts. I’ve now taken to put all times into an event list they can subscribe to with their calendars (using eventtolist.com), post reminders about the next broadcast 24 to 12h before and that seems to work better. I also offer links to timeanddate.com for the event for people to allow them to convert the event’s date and time into their own timezone - that also used to be an issue, my patrons come from a lot of places on the globe.
It’s a bit painful collecting the youtube event link and the link to the timezone conversion page for the posts in the Patreon Activity feed about each event - the current editor makes reuse of existing text (which I do here) quite hard to do, copy paste removes line breaks, link replacing is a bit iffy.
I wonder if an event post type might make sense that would offer subscription through a secret ICAL link with existing calendars, also send you reminders via patreon mail when an event starts, shows you the date and time in your own timezone and allows you a simple click through to whatever platform the creator chose for the event (YouTube, twitch, whatnot).
I’ve signed up for Picarto, but I’ve yet to use it. I like that it sends an email to anyone following to let you know when you’re live. You can also make private streams and if you pay a subscription fee you can record your livestream to play later, so you could potentially make two tiers for that: A reward where higher level patrons get an invite and can watch as you livestream and chat with you, and a lower level for access to the recorded video. When I set it up I will put the livestream in with my $1 reward and leave it public so potential patrons can join in. If I find it gets too full at some point I will make it by private invite for patrons and then make the recording a public post later for any who missed and any non-pledging followers.
At the moment I dont YET do patreon rewards with streams included BUT its within my plans when I get to my next goal.
To me as an artist, patrons will probably get to do doodle requests during stream time and I’m still thinking in more ideas to enable stream+patreon more linked so this thread to get some ideas.
I usually stream on twitch, it gives some nice features that enables more interactivity between streamer and watchers. But I know Picarto allows private streams under premium membership. And I’ve also seen some artists using google hangouts for private streams.
Hey foosel! Tim from the Patreon product team here. Thanks for your thoughts.
You mentioned that your patrons miss your broadcast because unlisted YT streams don’t generate a notification.
We’ve seen some creators make a poll on Patreon to find a time that works for the most patrons, and then create a Patreon post that links to the unlisted livestream – and that post generates notifications (email for everybody + a mobile push for your patrons who have the Patreon app).
Would that process help more patrons attend your livestreams?
I stream once a week anyway (three times soon) and also offer 1-on-1 and monthly private streams. Sadly my method of doing those will probably only work the first and second time (different twitch account; inb4 people subscribe to it).
I just can’t find anywhere that does private streams.
Hi Jessica,
I don’t know if this is any help but I wanted to make private livestream for my patrons too. I first wanted to us Zoom (you can be up to 50 people in the same video room) but then I figured that making a private facebook group with only my patrons will allow me to livestream only with my them. I added the facebook link to my welcome text, I check to make sure the did become a patron when adding them to the private facebook group.
The only issue will be that I’ll have to kick out people who stop pledging, but that not to bad to manage.
I hope this helps you.
Sandra
Hey Tim,
I already do that too. Post on Patreon, voting, links to YouTube, everything. Of course, I do that “announcement” post before the broadcast actually airs, several days in fact so people can block it in their calendar if they want. So if they get notified about that post, they also have a lot of time to forget the date and time again when the broadcast actually DOES start 
A lot of my Patrons have also complained that they do not receive notifications from Patreon at all (I’ve already told them to check their notification settings and their spam folder), so I’ve also taken to using a dedicated twitter account now where I post links to all posts in the activity feed with pledge level indicator (manually, because apparently there’s no way to automate that yet?), plus the occasional “broadcast starts soon”, and also a calendar feed provided by eventtolist that they can subscribe to to get actual calendar entries for upcoming broadcasts.
The latter is something I’d love to see on Patreon natively however, combined with a new “event” kind of post (including timezone information!).
You already - as far as I understand - have something similar going on for custom RSS feeds for podcasts with restricted episodes, so allowing personalized calendar feeds with events might even be within reach already (I’m a software developer, I know that engineers hate it when outsiders who don’t know the codebase say something like that, so take it with a grain of salt, don’t want to step on any toes :)) Just like with RSS there do exist established standards for something like that that work with people’s calendars (ICAL). Combine that even with an additional notification via email + app 5min or something before an event starts and chances are way higher that people won’t miss it.
Cheers and thanks for reading,
Gina
Hi Jessica and all who have commented.
I’ve been looking into this myself and have come across Google Meet, which I think is quite new. It’s only $5 per person and there is a whole suite of apps and stuff that goes with it in the Google Suite.
All the comments I’ve read so far say it is really good and very fast and easy for people to connect. You can have up to 30 people joining.
If I have a go I’ll let you know how it goes. If you have a go, let us know too!
I use picarto.tv and already do have a tier for private streams. It’d be nice if Patreon had a feature to livestream right on it.